aud-balleries

Synthetic Life

----

As Edge's own John Markoff reported from the recent Asilomar conference on artificial intelligence, the experts "generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet."

Who will ever write the code that ignites the spark? Craig Venter might be hinting at the answer when he tells us that "DNA... is absolutely the software of life." The language used by DNA is much closer to machine language than any language used by human brains. It should be no surprise that the recent explosion of coded communication between our genomes and our computers largely leaves us out.

"The notion that no intelligence is involved in biological evolution may prove to be one of the most spectacular examples of the kind of misunderstandings which may arise before two alien forms of intelligence become aware of one another," wrote viral geneticist (and synthetic biologist) Nils Barricelli in 1963. The entire evolutionary process "is a powerful intelligence mechanism (or genetic brain) that, in many ways, can be comparable or superior to the human brain as far as the ability of solving problems is concerned," he added in 1987, in the final paper he published before he died. "Whether there are ways to communicate with genetic brains of different symbioorganisms, for example by using their own genetic language, is a question only the future can answer."